What are food miles?
Feeding yourself has never been more complicated.
Although we live
in a land of plenty, there are now so many considerations when buying
food that the very process of eating can be a minefield.
One of the environmental considerations is food miles. A vast amount of food eaten in the UK comes from overseas – in terms of fresh produce alone, 50 per cent of our vegetables and a staggering 95 per cent of our fruit is imported.
Then there’s the haulage in trucks (in 2005, a quarter of all heavy goods vehicles on our roads were carrying food), which criss-cross the country between ports, depots and outlet.
Food miles have become particularly salient at a time when more and more opt to buy organic produce, believing it to be an environmentally sound choice, when in fact much organic produce sold in supermarkets may have been air-freighted into the country.
In 2005 Dr Tim Lang, who coined the phrase ‘food miles’, co-authored a paper concluding that, to reduce the environmental impact of food transportation, consumers should exert their potent political power and buy as much food as possible from within a 12-mile radius. They calculated this would equate to an annual ‘environmental saving’ of £2.1 billion in terms of the economic effects of congestion and environmental clean-up costs. Another £1.1 billion could be saved, they calculated, if all Britain’s farms went organic.
All of which adds to the headache facing conscientious consumers. For example, it remains rare for a supermarket to list the very locality where produce was grown and harvested, or how many journeys the produce makes across the country between source, depot and outlet. To further confuse things, food transported across the globe by container ship has a comparatively low impact, despite the mileages involved.
With the rapid rise in a culture of farmers’ markets in the UK, however, consumers are increasingly offered an alternative to supermarkets, with their food mile-heavy distribution infrastructures. Visit your town or neighbourhood farmers market, stock up on produce harvested as locally as possible, and your food miles can be remarkably low.
